TasWeekend: Charles Wooley on burning the Bishop’s effigy in the wake of church sell-offs

CHARLES WOOLEY: Things are getting heated in the Anglican Church sell-off debate, so much so that they’re talking about burning the Bishop’s effigy.

Tasmanian Anglican Bishop Richard Condie outside St Luke’s Church at Latrobe. Picture: CHRIS KIDD

NOT since the Protestant Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540 has there been such a fuss.

You will remember how jolly old Henry VIII, in between beheading wives, found time to disband English monasteries, convents and priories, selling them up and keeping their assets. It was a furore that set Catholics against Protestants for hundreds of years. The wonderful thing about history, kiddies, is that it always comes around again and again and again but we learn nothing from it.

Turn history’s page to the present and find Richard Condie, the Bishop of Tasmania’s Anglican Diocese, and his scheme to sell a swag of church properties. The first of them to go under the hammer was the charming little weatherboard church, St Luke’s at Judbury to an absentee bidder (probably an investor) for $107,000. Perhaps it will become “a divine little Airbnb” as well as the lowest priced dwelling anywhere in the Huon. The Anglican Church hopes to sell around 75 churches, most of them in the country. Not surprisingly the Bishop’s hit list has incited a religious and secular revolt across rural Tasmania. The Bishop’s disposal sale aims to raise $20 million with about 25 per cent of the funds reserved for payment to the victims of sexual abuse. These are indeed dark days for the church. It has abused children in its care and now it will make country congregations pay for the sins of the clergy. It might even look like the church is socialising its guilt while privatising its profits.

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In this toxic time for institutional Christianity the poison goes right to the very top, as we saw this week with the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick over allegations that 50 years ago he sexually abused a 16-year-old boy. McCarrick was one of the Pope’s closest Vatican advisers and a powerful American church leader. His fall represents a growing revulsion against a church culture of cover-up and unaccountability.

On Sunday, put your head in almost any mainstream church and you will find the place virtually empty. In that sense Condie is not alone in the Anglican Church in evoking a return to the simplicity of the early Christian church in which buildings were less important than core faith. I am not religious but as a child I was indoctrinated in a Methodist Sunday school and weirdly snippets of the text remain. Matthew 18.20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” is one I remember as a scriptural basis for an honest simplicity in worship. But that was before Jesus became a multinational industry. Bishop Condie returns to that argument by suggesting the local coffee shop or someone’s lounge room would be as good as a church. In which case why sell off mostly the rural churches? Country parishioners are suggesting that St John’s in Launceston or St David’s in Hobart might raise enough cash to wipe the redress slate clean. Bishop Condie says the properties were chosen for sale based on their viability.

Sealy’s Store at Bothwell is a cafe known for its scones, pies and friendly staff. I met there one morning with members of the congregation of the lovely old St Michael’s Parish Church. To say they are “put out” about being “put out” of their fine old 1880s sandstone church would be an understatement. “Condie will come and go but his legacy here won’t be the abuse-redress-scheme. He will be remembered as the man who destroyed Anglicanism in Tasmania,” insisted Ron Sunners, a fifth generation local and a stalwart of the church. “He is ripping the spiritual heart out of our community and trying to turn us into a bunch of modern happy clappers with no church to worship in.”

As you know, if you suffer my column on a regular basis, I am a most unlikely “defender of the faith”. But I am an enthusiast for defending our history and our heritage. Fly-fishing on the rivers and streams of Tasmania is my religion and our charming little country churches are an intrinsic part of a much-loved landscape. St Luke’s I have passed and admired many times at Judbury. On the Macquarie and the Esk rivers I have often lounged in the shade of old church elms and oaks on a hot afternoon when the trout were sleeping. The graveyards tell our stories while the buildings are often painted, photographed and appreciated by people who might never darken the door of a church. People like me who love the view from the outside, vastly outnumber the dwindling band of worshippers within.

If there is any clear evidence that flogging off the churches is a vexatious policy look no further than the overwhelming opposition from local government across regional Tasmania. It takes a lot to get our oversupply of 29 mayors to all pull in the same direction, but the Condie scheme has united them in anger. The 15 mayors I met with in Hobart recently all spoke as one. “We will oppose this with all our resources. We will invoke planning regulations and heritage legislation to bring down this crazy scheme,” the furious mayors told me.

Unless the state government brings some sensible negotiation to the conflict it looks set to become a lawyers’ feast and a great embarrassment to its architects.

In the pleasant wide boulevards of gracious old colonial Bothwell, otherwise moderate folk are sounding angry and emotional. “The Bishop’s last visit,” they said, “left us with a very unhappy and unsympathetic impression. We won’t let him destroy our church without a fight.” Richard Condie should certainly steer well clear of Sealy’s cafe where, when I was leaving town, the locals were discussing burning his effigy in protest. Shades of the 1600s, but that’s history, if you wait long enough it comes round again. It won’t be bad for tourism though. Burning the Bishop’s effigy will certainly put quiet little Bothwell on the map.